MEDLEY MAGAZINE FALL 2017
BEHIND BLACKER THE BERRY
ANOTHER ROUND
THE JAPAN LESS TRAVELED
Three student artists showcased their talent at the alternative Juice Jam.
A local boxer endures fights both in and outside the ring. Witness a writer’s experience at a feminist festival.
A writer shares vignettes of her favorite Japanese adventures.
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LETTER FROM OUR EDITOR
S TA F F FA L L 2 017
written by Erica Petz EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ERICA PETZ EDITORIAL EXECUTIVE EDITOR ELLIOT WILLIAMS MANAGING EDITOR LAZARE DE MONTILLE
Dear reader, Sometimes, things are more difficult than we anticipate. Putting this issue together was one of those things. For awhile, it felt like everything that could go wrong, did: people quitting, stories falling apart, and a myriad of other setbacks. Carole Horan, an elderly woman in Syracuse who writes letters to combat injustice (page 7), shared with us a quote from former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” I kept this in mind as we pushed on to finish Medley, even when it seemed impossible. Just like us, the people in our stories have overcome challenges, such as SU’s Native American students adjusting to their new surroundings (page 5), the Bosnian refugee who became a boxing coach despite his three heart surgeries (page 13), and the community members at the Land Bank fighting vacancy with art (page 21). None of them gave up the fight, and I’m proud to say that neither did we. As always, a huge thank you to everyone who made this issue possible; we couldn’t have done it without you.
SENIOR EDITORS PAIGE KELLY APRIL RINK ASSISTANT EDITOR WENG CHEONG WRITERS LAUREN CIFRA NAOMI DUTTWEILER EMMA FAHEY JASMINE GOMEZ
CREATIVE DIRECTOR YINGYING YUE ART EXECUTIVE PHOTOGRAPHER CODIE YAN PHOTOGRAPHERS CRYSTAL FANG EMPORIA MENG KAI NGUYEN ZENNY WANG ADVISOR MELISSA CHESSHER
cover photo by Crystal Fang left photo by Zenny Wang
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CONTENTS
A DAY AT ANYELA’S
Visit a destination winery in nearby Skaneateles. page 3
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
Understand the struggles Native American students face. page 5
LETTERS, CREATIVITY, ACTION
Meet Syracuse’s 75-year-old letter-writing activist. page 7
THE JAPAN LESS TRAVELED
Follow a writer’s adventures off the beaten path. page 9
ANOTHER ROUND
Witness a local boxer’s journey from Bosnian refugee to nonprofit founder. page 13
BEHIND BLACKER THE BERRY
Get to know the students who performed at the alternative Juice Jam. page 18 TALK TO US
UNFORGOTTEN
@MEDLEYMAGAZINE
Check out the experimental paint jobs on Syracuse’s abandoned buildings. page 21
FIND US ONLINE ISSUU.COM/ MEDLEYMAGAZINE
Medley shares stories from our campus, our city, and our globe that explore the intersection of cultures from a socially conscious persepective. The magazine publishes once a semester with funding from your Syracuse University student fee. All contents of the publication are copyright Fall 2017 by their respective creators.
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KIA ORA, NEW ZEALAND
Explore an indigenous Maori village. page 24
COME TO THE TABLE
Watch a pop-up dinner party unite a diverse community. page 27
MOMENTS ABROAD
See snapshots of life abroad from SU students. page 29
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A DAY AT A N Y E L A’S Put down that $6 bottle of wine and go to a treasured Skaneateles vineyard.
words & photos by Lauren Cifra
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f you’re getting bored of downtown Syracuse, you should check out a little town about 30 minutes away called Skaneateles. The town is known for its million-dollar real estate, streets of old buildings that are now restaurants, boutiques, and antique shops, and scenic views of 16-mile-long Skaneateles Lake — one of the cleanest lakes in the country and the source of our drinking water in Syracuse. As part of the Finger Lakes region west of Syracuse, Skaneateles is also known for its wine. A favorite stop along the west side of the lake is Anyela’s Vineyards, a little winery set atop a grape-filled hill with a gravel driveway. My mother, a Skaneateles native, my father and I decided that a gloomy Saturday morning would be the perfect time to indulge ourselves with a wine tasting. Fortunately, it’s not too crowded when we arrive due to the overcast skies which is exactly what we wanted. We’re easily able to explore the vineyard and the two buildings at the winery: the main building and then the wine cellar normally used for events and additional tastings. We have our tasting in the main building because the cellar, on this weekend, is really just open for curious sightseers like us. Anyela’s first opened its doors in 2008, growing and thriving as a business ever since. Because of the active Skaneateles community, owner and
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director of marketing and sales Patti Nocek fell vin love with the area. She knew the spot along the lake would provide an excellent location for a destination winery versus being among dozens of others along the wine trail spanning Cayuga and Seneca Lakes. The winery is frequented by longdistance visitors as well as locals. While Anyela’s doesn’t serve meals, they do offer cheese boards and other snacks to munch on while sampling. With an oaky and expansive bar, a stone fireplace, leather couches and plenty of additional seating, the inviting atmosphere makes you want to get cozy with your friends and a glass — or bottle — of wine. Patti and Jim Nocek have worked to create an ambiance that is warm and welcoming, encouraging guests to be repeat customers. “We want the customers to have a relaxing and educational visit with an informal experience,” Patti says. She hopes that
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patrons leave with a better understanding of wine production because the knowledgeable staff at Anyela’s was able to answer all of their questions. Anyela’s tends to its vines using an approach unique to other vineyards in the Finger Lakes, making an effort to preserve them for longer life expectancies. Each vine is removed from its respective trellis, a framework for the grapes, and is buried during the fall harvest to protect them from the cold. At the start of spring, winery’s staff re-trellises the vines to expose them to the sun. As dry wine drinkers, we decide to purchase the Overlay, a notable dry red. Anyela’s describes the Overlay as, “A blend of 50 percent Cabernet Franc, 25 percent Pinot Noir, 25 percent Cabernet Sauvignon. This wine is very smooth with berry characteristics and a bit of spiciness.” The “spiciness” in the Overlay pairs well with the horseradish
cheeseboard we ordered. While the dry red is delightful, the vineyard also makes its own Merlot, Riesling, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Franc and a few more. These were bottled between 2009 and 2014. We sip our wine as we sit atop the high-rise deck built to overlook the wooded area and best of all, the lake. In a word, the view is breathtaking. The tree-lined landscape is dotted with grand, ornate 19th-century homes that make you wish you could move here. Although Anyela’s busy season spans from April to September, the winery is open on Saturdays and Sundays through the winter season for wine tastings. It is a must-visit if you have guests or parents coming to town.
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W H E N WO R L D S COLLI D E Campus resources help Native American students balance home and college life.
written by Jasmine Gomez & photo by Crystal Fang Kacey Chopito and Regina Jones in the Native Student Program lounge
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or Nathan Gannsworth, coming to Syracuse University was a sort of culture shock. He grew up on the Tuscarora Reservation, a small part of Indian Country located near Niagara Falls with a population of just over 1,000. He comes from a quiet, tight-knit community — much different from a bustling college campus with more than 20,000 students. “You feel like you’re just
another person. You feel like you just dissolve into the background, and that was a huge problem,” Gannsworth says. Gannsworth, now a sophomore studying sports management, was the first in his family to leave home and go to college. He was excited to start his college career at Syracuse, and he received good grades his first semester. But by the second half of freshman year, the homesickness kicked in and affected
his performance in class. “I could not fall asleep during the night because I wasn’t at home surrounded by my family,” Gannsworth says. “And not being able just to focus. It was just a mental block in my head because I wasn’t at home.” Many Native American students struggle with that culture shift when entering higher education. According to the American College Personnel Association, Native American students
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represent less than one percent of all college students in the U.S., making it hard for many of these students to find a piece of “home” in their college settings. They encounter few people who identify with their culture, leading to feelings of isolation and difficulty in finding a social support system. Though retentions rates among Native Americans in higher education are lower than those of white students according to the ACPA, researchers suggest that students who are able to connect with their cultural identity at school are more likely to succeed in reaching their educational goals. Regina Jones, assistant director of the Office Multicultural Affairs, as well as a member of the Onondaga Nation, believes that Native students have trouble adjusting because Indigenous values are different from American ones. “We’re more [about] extended family, community, helping each other, and not so much about individual success, rising to the top, making the most money, that kind of thing,” Jones says. Gannsworth developed social anxiety from having to learn a new way to interact with people, which made it difficult for him to speak up in class. “When you’re back home, you just develop this way you talk to other Native people and your peers,” Gannsworth says. “You talk like that throughout your whole life and do certain things, but when you come to a big city like this those things become obsolete.” Native Americans have some of their own slang, and those words have often crept into Nathan’s conversations at SU. But the words don’t have the same meaning here. Senior Kacey Chopito, a political science major and a native of the Zuni Pueblo, also struggled with participating in class. In his college career, first at the University of Rochester and then at SU, his professors always told him to speak more. For both Chopito and
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Gannsworth, their tribes taught them that younger people wait until an elder is done speaking before inserting their thoughts. That value doesn’t fit in a university setting where it’s common for students and professors to engage in lively back and forth during a class discussion. “We come from one world, and they’re living in a completely different world, and you have those two worlds colliding a lot of the time,” Chopito says. Native students navigate being between these two worlds with the help of Indigenous Students at Syracuse, an organization that aims to instill a sense of belonging in SU’s Native students while educating the general campus community about Native American issues. “For students that can’t go back home often, having a place that you can go and feel at home really helps in the transition,” says Chopito, who serves as the organization’s president. Students also use the resources provided by the Native Student Program, established in 2005. Jones was part of the two-person team that started the program with the help of the Office of Multicultural Affairs and what’s now known as the Division of Enrollment and the Student Experience. Designed to assist Native students in their transition to college, the Native Student Program hosts a three-day orientation for new students, workshops, and many opportunities to continue fostering connections between Native students, their people, and their heritage. “Throughout the years it’s changed because we found to be successful, our students really needed their people around them, a place they can call theirs,” Jones says.
The Native Student Program provides that physical home away from home. At 113 Euclid Ave., the building that houses both the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Native Student Program, the students have access to a small lounge. Decorated with Indigenous artwork and other tokens reminiscent of Native American culture, the room has Native books to read, a computer, and a couch Jones says is so comfortable that the students sometimes fight over it for naps between classes. For some students like Jocelynn Martin, a senior public health major and a native of the Mohawk Tribe at Akwesasne, the transition has become easier as she’s learned to balance home and campus life. Back on the reservation, Martin re-immerses
“We come from one world, and they’re living in a completely different world.” herself in her culture by participating in some of the tribal ceremonies, but here at Syracuse she’s focused on making the most of her experience. “When I’m here my priorities are just having a normal social life, getting the most out of college, getting good grades, and making sure I’m on track,” Martin says. “Just normal college things.” But being focused on school, doesn’t mean that she often doesn’t think about what’s going on at home. “I sometimes have the guilt that I’m missing out on a lot of stuff back home,” Martin says, “But I try not to let that depict what I do here because it’s good what I’m doing here — it’s good that I’m here.”
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LETTE R S, C R E AT I V I T Y, ACT I O N A longtime local activist proves the pen is mightier than the sword.
written by April Rink & photo by Emporia Meng
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spunky woman and the comforting aroma of coffee greet me upon my arrival to Salt City Coffee. This woman, with short white hair bursting with vivid purples and blues, stands out among the occupied tables. The peacock colors resemble the hues of the feather tattooed on her forearm — a reminder of the birds she repeatedly saw throughout her many travels. She’s wearing a pink sweater she knit herself. “I’m feeling like a cappuccino today,” she says. Carole Horan is a 75-year-old woman from the Westside
of Syracuse whose neighborhood, mindset, and art shaped her into the community activist she is today. A big cheerleader, as her daughter says, she’s not a marcher or a protester; rather, she writes letters to local government officials. About 40 years since her first letter, she has formed relationships with people in government and organizations that help her handwritten messages, emails, and phone calls, get taken seriously. Horan’s path to activism didn’t begin until her 30s. As a stay-at-home mother of seven, it was difficult for her to physically be out in the community to speak her mind on social
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justice issues, like equal opportunity. So she wrote letters. “Activism is a reaction to something you’re passionate about, and how you choose to be active in that would be a personal choice,” Horan says. In recent years, Horan has turned to emails. In 2014, Horan emailed then-mayor Stephanie Miner and a common councilor after repeatedly seeing people selling furniture illegally from a truck in the Westside. She contacted several people before sending this email to Miner as a last resort: “It makes the neighborhood look trashy… I feel pretty certain there are certain areas of the city where this would NEVER be allowed, for even one day,” Horan wrote. After a back-and-forth exchange, the situation was resolved. As a firm believer in equal opportunity, not all of Horan’s letters are harsh. “If I write a letter to complain about something, I’m going to write a letter another time to someone else giving them a compliment,” she says. At a national level, Horan volunteers with Death Row Support Project by writing letters to male prisoners. She and a man named Jeff from Nashville corresponded for 17 years until he unexpectedly died in prison. He confessed to Horan how writing to a stranger who was genuinely interested in becoming friends helped ease his depression, which she noticed as his letters grew longer and deeper, she says. While she’s written to several inmates, she wrote to Jeff the longest, and he was the only inmate she visited. Horan also finds several outlets to get involved locally. In the past, she served on the Citizen Review Board and the Near Westside Peacemaking
Initiative Project, and she worked as a literacy volunteer at the local library. For over 25 years and counting, Horan has serviced Huntington Family Centers, where she currently serves on the board of directors. This neighborhood settlement house hosts educational, health, and support programs for all ages. As a community activist, Horan sees similar issues arise time and time again in the Westside. Her greatest concerns include lack of attention from public officials in her area and poor media coverage. Horan says she believes the media’s rhetoric surrounding events like the “Skiddy Park murder” and limited coverage of positivity play into the Westside’s negative stereotypes. Skiddy Park’s reputation has been tainted by the shots fired at an outdoor Father’s Day party in 2016, killing one person in the crossfire. However, the incident did not actually occur at the park, only near it. Horan’s most recent work in progress stems from the policies and narratives from President Donald Trump and his administration. “It’s disheartening to watch our president,” she says. “I think our country has lost a tremendous amount of respect throughout the world.” After he was elected, she couldn’t sit by without adding any positivity to the situation she, and many others, found to be negative. She needed a response. To find her inspiration, she turned to a trick she does with her brain. “When you go to bed and there’s something that you’d like to work out — a problem that’s bothering you — say out loud to your brain, ‘Okay brain, this is what I want you to work on tonight,’” Horan says. “It’s good to say
it out loud and then be prepared in the morning to write the answer down.” It was around Inauguration Day, and Horan would be leaving for a Hawaiian cruise from San Diego in a few days. She flew to California early, and on her first night there, she went through the steps of her brain trick. When she woke up, she scribbled the idea that came to her: art with refugees. This was Horan’s first sign to act on her motivation. The next sign came while aboard the cruise ship. An avid reader, she went to the gift shop to find a book. With few options, she chose one at random: Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains — about refugees. The final sign was Trump’s travel ban. Helping refugees with art could take many different forms. Horan’s artistic experiments focus on collage, photography, and greeting cards. For this project, Horan is partnering with Interfaith Works, through which she will teach art and English to a young Ukrainian girl. Horan doesn’t have formal training as an art teacher and felt intimidated by the idea at first until a friend reminded her she’s not an art teacher, “yet.” Horan recites a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman she admires for her fearlessness, “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” In this stage of her life, Horan has more time to try things she never thought she’d do before. “The best part of being retired is you only really have to do what you want,” she says. For Horan, that means enjoying time with her family, sipping on coffee, and standing up for what she believes in.
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T H E J A PA N L E S S T R AV E L E D One writer finds her best Japanese adventures outside Tokyo.
words & photos by Emma Fahey & map by Yingying Yue May 7, 2017: Tokyo As I hurriedly weave through crowds of people rushing to make their morning commute at Tokyo Station, oversized suitcase in tow, I can’t help but laugh to myself. What a fitting end to such a hectic week. Still running, my two closest friends, Miranda and Steph, and I prepare to haul our suitcases up a flight of stairs to the train platform but are stopped by an eternally patient Japanese guard who points with a wry smile to the escalator on the other side of the platform. We take the left side of the escalator, moving clumsily past the polite commuters waiting patiently in line on the right, and stumble into the sleek, white shinkansen (bullet train) that promptly closes its doors. Miranda
catches my eye, panting, and mouths, “90 seconds.” We made the train back home with a minute and a half to spare. On the two-hour train ride, I feel the stress from my week in Tokyo melting away as city fades into countryside. Sure, Tokyo has its appeal, but I ultimately felt frustrated by the city’s large crowds, packed subways, and high prices. I’m relieved to leave behind the hustle and bustle of it all, jarring compared to the city I call home, where my friends and I don’t feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of options for food and fun, and the locals don’t treat us like bumbling tourists simply because we’re not Japanese. While I didn’t enjoy Tokyo, coming here was important for me to
understand what I loved so much about the Japan that I had lived and traveled in prior to this trip. As I reflect on the train, I realize I’m quite proud of the several other adventures that provided some of the most intense, emotional, and sometimes bizarre experiences I was privileged enough to have during my five-month-long stay in Japan. January 19, 2017: Hirakata City In spring 2017, I spent my semester at Kansai Gaidai University in Hirakata City, a calm suburb in the Osaka prefecture (one of Japan’s 47 administrative divisions) on Japan’s main island. Along with the school’s international ties and English-speaking program, I chose this school because
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of its welcoming yet relatively touristfree location. About all Hirakata is known for is a theme park with a big wooden roller coaster named “Elf.” I fondly recall the day Miranda, Steph, and I began our favorite weekly tradition. We want to taste the local cuisine, so one Friday after our classes end around 6 p.m., my friends and I follow the recommendation a girl in our apartment complex made and head downtown to a noodle shop called Takabashi, located at the end of a row of restaurants near the train station. A bright neon sign advertises Takabashi in stylized hiragana. Upon entering, we’re greeted by restaurant employees in chef ’s clothes who urge us to sit wherever we’re comfortable. The shop is small but welcoming. Businessmen stopping for a quick bite sit at a bar near the kitchen, and other patrons take to the green booths that fill the rest of the space. Reading the menu takes a bit of
time and effort, but once we order, the food arrives quickly. As a fan of spicy food, I order Takabashi’s signature honou (“fire” or “flame”) ramen — and I fall in love with it upon dipping my spoon into the red broth, taking my first bite. As we chow down, the shared looks of satisfaction on our faces tell each of us what we already know: We’re definitely coming back to Takabashi.
roam the streets freely, bowing to visitors in hopes of receiving “deer crackers” that vendors sell in stacks for 100 yen (about $1). On this day, however, the deer seem overwhelmed by the crowds of people gathered here in Nara Park to witness Wakakusa Yamayaki — an annual event in which the grassy face of Mt. Wakakusa is lit on fire. Exactly why, even those who celebrate the festival every year are unsure, though there are a couple of theories. Some say the mountain was burned during boundary conflicts between Nara’s great temples, while others claim the fires staved off wild boars. After a brilliant fireworks display, the mountain is set ablaze. As the ceremonial torch makes its way up the mountain, the drying grass starts to burn ever so slowly and gradually gains traction. Soon, the night sky is lit up a glowing ember orange, and soot rains down on our heads. The fire’s heat is
January 28, 2017: Nara One of my first weekends in Japan, the girls in the apartment below mine invite Steph, Miranda, and me to a festival taking place in Nara. I hadn’t even mastered taking the buses downtown yet, so I’m nervous about traveling on multiple trains to a small town a prefecture away. But they’ve been here a full semester already, so I trust they know what they’re doing. My friends and I agree to go. Nara is famous for the deer that
Okunoshima Hirakata City
Tokyo
Shizuoka
Mt. Koya
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Nara
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welcome on this chilly January evening. Eventually, the mountain stops burning, but a fire has been ignited in my heart. April 22, 2017: Okunoshima The sun’s rays beam down on us when our ferry lands at Hiroshima prefecture’s Okunoshima, better known as Bunny Island. The island boasts a tropical climate and equally tropical plant life decorating every path. Armed with bags of rabbit food we picked up for free at the ferry dock, Miranda, Steph, and I take our first steps onto the island and discuss which path to explore — only to be interrupted by the island’s furry inhabitants bounding up to us in packs, looking for a handout. As we hike around the island, feeding and petting the various rabbits we encounter and becoming sunburnt in the process, we stumble upon a concrete shell of a building, with all its window frames but no glass and brown-black vines growing on the outside. A plaque tells us in English and Japanese that the island was once a strategic point for the Japanese military. This building served as a chemical weapons facility during the Sino-Japanese War in the 1920s but now stands derelict as a home for bunnies.
After a couple hours of climbing, we reach the peak of the island. From here, we can see the other neighboring islands of the Hiroshima prefecture and not-so-distant mountains which seem to be sticking out of the glassy green sea. Tired and sweaty, we sit down to relax and admire the view. Perhaps I left my bag of rabbit food slightly open, or the bunnies sensed our presence; within minutes, friendly rabbits are climbing all over us to get a treat. I bask in the surreal feeling of being covered in soft rabbits nibbling away gently at the food pellets in my hands while bathing in the warm sunlight.
April 29, 2017: Mt. Koya Around us, the ancient forest echoes with our footsteps and what I can only describe as the spirits settling down. It is a dreary day, raining intermittently for hours. However, exploring Mt. Koya’s 1,200-year-old Okunoin Cemetery is worth weathering some showers. We pass hundreds of graves, some so old that the names of their inhabitants are worn off by weather and vegetation. Statues of Buddhist and Shinto deities dot the landscape. Other sites are less traditional, including a space shuttle replica designed as a memorial for an aeronautics company and a statue covered in bright pink lipstick. I approach a massive tomb surrounded by moss-coated artifacts. A small gate covering the tomb’s entrance entices me to look inside. I turn on my phone’s flashlight and gasp when I come face to face with an eerie, white-faced statue of the demigod Jizo — the saint of stillborn and aborted babies, purgatory, and, fittingly, travel. In esoteric Buddhism, he’s said to lead spirits to the afterlife. Jizo has obviously been here a while. The candelabra around him are rusted
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and untouched, and a green stain of mold or moss creeps along the wall behind his head. Yet he remains, arms open, a shrewd smile on his worn face. I quickly take a picture and move on. May 5, 2017: Shizuoka After three hours of standing in the same cramped train car followed by a 20-minute taxi ride, we’re relieved to see the doors of the spa looming in front of us. The building seems to come out of nowhere — a dense swath of brush hides it from the road, which is quiet and empty. An old dog sits out front next to a sign encouraging visitors to pet him. Flanked by Miranda and Steph, I don’t know what to expect from a traditional Japanese onsen (hot spring), but we enter anyway. An elderly couple at the front desk greet us with slightly puzzled glances over wrinkled newspapers. Smiling sheepishly, my friends and I explain in our best broken Japanese that we’re here for the onsen. The couple immediately smile, charge us 500 yen (about $5) each, and lead us to the doors of a small, empty locker room where we are expected to undress before venturing into the hot spring area. Although getting stark naked in
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front of my friends feels uncomfortable at first, we adjust relatively quickly. Before stepping into an onsen, it’s custom to shower while sitting on small stools. It sounds easy enough, but upon confidently entering the hot spring area, I notice a couple of things. One: A clear glass panel bordering the enormous bath offers a breathtaking view of Mt. Fuji, which dwarfs the buildings surrounding it. And, two: A circle of Japanese women, equally as unclad as we are, gawk at the three naked tourists who just strolled into their onsen. Rather than breaking eye contact and resuming their business like the Japanese usually do after seeing foreigners, the women continue to stare as though judging us in some bizarre bathing competition. I feel an overwhelming urge to bow, apologize, return to the locker room, and get dressed, but instead my friends and I brave the discomfort and choose a row of showers in the corner and try to ignore the looks piercing our bare backs. After showering, we finally wade into the spring. I’m initially surprised by the water’s intense heat, but at the same time it feels quite refreshing. The spring is like a giant hot tub with a few seats in it, lined with clean white tile and a bubbling fountain in
the center. As I settle down into the warmth, my head grows as light as the wispy clouds settling on top of Mt. Fuji outside. In 20 minutes we’ll have to emerge from the spring to douse ourselves with ice water or else pass out, but for now, I feel relaxed. I chuckle to myself at the strange but happy thought that rises to my mind like the steam off of the hot spring: there’s something to be said about feeling comfortable and confident while you’re fully exposed to a bunch of strangers. I glance across the bath at an older Japanese woman sitting contentedly across from me. She lifts the damp, white wash towel that lays across her eyes. This time instead of staring, she flashes a bright grin.
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A N OT H E R ROU N D A local boxer, Bosnian refugee and survivor of three open-heart surgeries, takes up one more fight.
written by Elliot Williams & photos by Codie Yan
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Lazarus Sims and his son
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n an indoor turf field that used to be the ice skating rink at Burnet Park, people begin to trickle in and stretch their limbs in nervous anticipation of the scheduled 12 p.m. “bootcamp workout.” Here, on the Far Westside of Syracuse, children hang from monkey bars on a playground outside, and others play softball on a nearby diamond in the brisk, midOctober air. One young man arrives particularly groggy — the Syracuse Orange had just upset the No.2ranked Clemson Tigers in football the night before — but he faces an intense workout that will soon wake him up and, quite literally, floor him. Even Srdan Lukic (pronounced Surgeon Loo-kich), who’s in charge of
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this operation, is a little loopy and stiff in the legs, but for a completely different reason. The 34-year-old boxing coach has recently experienced arrhythmia, in other words, an offbeat heart. Three days prior to the bootcamp workout, he underwent a procedure in which probes were inserted from his legs to his chest to destroy the heart tissue that caused the misfiring electrical signals. But this is nothing new for Lukic. Born in Bosnia with a congenital heart defect, he survived three open-heart surgeries before he was 13 years old, the second of which put him into a monthlong coma. UN troops flew him from his war-torn homeland to Syracuse in 1996 so he could receive his final surgery at Upstate Medical University Hospital. The surgeries left a scar the length of his
torso, and yet, it’s a detail he practically glosses over when telling his life story, not wanting to be portrayed as a victim or “the kid that’s barely making it.” “That’s what I’ve been fighting against my whole life,” Lukic says. “I want to be treated equally and respected for what I do, just like anyone else. Boxing was great for that because you go in the ring, and no one knows you have a heart issue. You’re just a competitor, and people will step all over you if you let them. In the ring, there’s no taking it easy on you.” Twenty years after his last openheart surgery, Lukic’s battle with his heart defect led him to create Fight For Hearts, a nonprofit organization that promotes heart health through
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boxing, clean eating, and anaerobic workouts. He has always been a fighter, and running his fitness organization is just another round. At this particular workout, Lukic unloads heavy sleighs, medicine balls, resistance bands, and battle ropes from his car while Jim Pigg, his friend and trainer of 10 years, leads warm-ups with a black boot on his broken left foot. With radio-edited rap songs blasting from speakers, the two lead a series of tiger crawls, traveling pushups, and increasingly difficult exercises that leave even the former Division I athletes in attendance on the ground in a race to catch their breath. Their collective grit comes from a philosophy Lukic developed while competing as an amateur boxer for nine years before becoming a coach himself: “You can’t wait for things to happen,” Lukic says. “It’s never going to be the perfect moment. Out of 54 fights, there were maybe one or two where I felt 100 percent. You’re
always going to be hurting, so you have to just start and go from there.” He remembers a happy childhood in Sarajevo, a city nestled in a valley surrounded by mountains that once hosted the winter Olympics of 1984. Despite living in what was then communist Yugoslavia, his father, a sound engineer, and his mother, a theater actress, provided a fruitful life for Srdan and his older brother, Goran. “My family, we owned a sailboat, an apartment, and a car,” Lukic says. “We were pretty much a middle class family. And we had a great life.” But from 1992 to 1995, those hills, where bobsledders competed a decade prior, were lined with troops who rained grenades and sniper bullets into the city below — the result of a multilayered conflict between ethnic divisions of Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. This conflict led to war crimes on every side, over 100,000 casualties, and 2.2 million people forced to flee
Srdan after his final surgery at Upstate Medical University Hospital. Courtesy of Srdan Lukic.
their homes, according to the UN Refugee Agency. Lukic recalls being under the threat of death constantly, but at eight years old, he couldn’t fully understand the cause of all the chaos. “They would cease fire for three to four days, and then they’d start shooting for about an hour, bombs nonstop,” he says. “There was no running water, no electricity, and food was scarce.” As part of the Peacekeeping Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina to reform law enforcement and provide humanitarian relief, the UN sent troops to monitor patients like Lukic who suffered from serious health conditions. The troops transferred Lukic’s family to Syracuse as soon as the war stopped. For the next two years, he adjusted to life in and out of the hospital. He took up basketball but was kicked off the middle school team when the coaches discovered his heart condition. As a student at Nottingham High School, he became inactive, grew to about 200 pounds, and watched from the sidelines as his brother excelled at sports. “He did everything that I couldn’t do,” Lukic says. “So I always looked up to him and competed with him. I wanted to be better. It wasn’t until I started boxing — that’s kind of when I took over.” At the Burnet Park workout, he stands 5 feet 8 inches tall with 154 pounds of lean muscle and a heart rate under 50. It’s hard to imagine Lukic 50 pounds heavier. A lifelong multiinstrumentalist, he enrolled at SU to study music industry and engineering. While he eventually dropped the music industry concentration after struggling to manage the double major, he picked up another passion — boxing. A hard worker, toughened by the housing projects of Syracuse where his family lived, he fit right in at the Syracuse Friends of Boxing Club at the downtown YMCA. “I think I had more dedication and
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hard work than other people, maybe not as much talent,” Lukic says. “There are a lot of parallels between boxing and life. You can’t hide how hard you worked. If you go to the gym, and you lied about your work ethic, it will show.” Tom Coulter, a hall of fame Olympic coach who founded the club in 1965, took note of Lukic’s versatility in the ring. Under Coulter’s tutelage, Lukic had 54 bouts between 2003 and 2012, winning three New York State Golden Gloves titles and representing the U.S. at an international tournament in Tampere, Finland in 2009. Coulter still admires and supports Lukic at the YMCA where they volunteer as coaches and on the sidelines of his bootcamp workouts. “Here they are on a Saturday, working out with people who normally
according to my lawyers. But I kept it on because I’m all about transparency.” The police made a false arrest, Lukic says. “The whole incident was this — seven Marines jumped us on Marshall Street. We basically got up and whooped them, and got in the car and left. That was it. That’s all that happened,” Lukic says. The police arrived and arrested Lukic and his companions without taking statements from them, setting their bail at $20,000. With a strike of good fortune, the cameras on Marshall Street recorded the entire encounter and proved Lukic’s account to be legitimate. All charges were dropped. “And no apologies, nothing. They just kind of let us out and were like, ‘Yup, go back to life.’ But SU kicked us out. We lost everything that we worked for.”
in the MBA program at Le Moyne College. In 2013, he graduated with a concentration in nonprofit marketing and was promoted to engineering manager. As a boxer, he went on to compete with even more fervor than before, racking up the impressive collection of trophies he has today. Boxing is a dying sport, but there is plenty of life in the training process, Lukic says. After retiring from competition, he wanted to give back to the Syracuse community, founding Fight For Hearts in 2014. For the past three years, Lukic and his team have experienced the highs and lows of running a non-profit organization. The recent Burnet Park workouts started from an accidental partnership between Lukic and Lazarus Sims, commissioner
“There are a lot of parallels between boxing and life. You can’t hide how hard you worked.” wouldn’t have a place to do so,” Coulter says. “[Lukic] and his trainers developed this right from the beginning with goals in mind, and they’ve fulfilled them.” Typically, Lukic registered for fights months before stepping into the ring. But on one particular night, the fight came to him. A Google search of Lukic’s name pulls up a 2003 Daily Orange report: “3 charged in M-Street brawl.” In the report, Lukic, his brother, and a third individual were charged with assault in the second degree, robbery in the first degree, and possession of criminal weapons. Surprisingly, Lukic almost sounds relieved to talk about this report. “That’s one of the chapters of my life that I left on,” he says. “I could have taken that down with the Daily Orange,
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That run-in with the law, what he describes as a life-changing event, left a wound more severe than any he sustained in boxing. For a time, job interviews went poorly, even though Lukic was open about the incident. “I think these hiring managers already had their opinion no matter what was said, so I didn’t get those jobs,” he says. “But I’m fine with taking these little losses in life.” It took Lukic over a year to get back into school and into the ring. But with Coulter signing the necessary court documents, Lukic was reinstated at SU and resumed his boxing career. Eventually, he was hired as a radio frequency engineer at C-Squared Systems, a wireless network company in East Syracuse, and enrolled
of the Syracuse Department of Parks, Recreation & Youth Programs. “I was here to check in on the sports complex, and Srdan was standing outside,” Sims says of their first encounter at the park. “He told me what his mission was and what he was coming up here to do. He met with my staff, and we thought it was a great idea for Syracuse. We need people to be outside and get active.” Sims, 44, is a former star point guard at Syracuse University who led the Orangemen to the 1996 NCAA championship game against Kentucky. He graduated from Henninger High School and grew up “a park kid” on the Southside of Syracuse. After graduating from SU in 1996, Sims played for a handful of semi-professional teams
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and even the Harlem Globetrotters, before returning to SU and joining Jim Boeheim’s coaching staff in 2007. He was then an assistant coach at Binghamton University for two years before returning home and taking the Parks Department position in 2015. It took Lukic a while to get ahold of Sims, but once he did, the two athletes realized they were meant to be working in tandem. “My whole family is at the workouts, from my fouryear-old to my wife,” Sims says. “So, I love it. It bonds us together and gets everybody out to have a good feeling.” Lukic’s fiancée, Marija Kalas, who just so happens to work in the cardiac division at Upstate University Hospital, promotes every workout on social media. She smiles while remembering a time when they bounced from park to park on a promise that they would stay out of the Parks Department’s way. “It’s really amazing,” she says. “It’s cool to see, because we had a five-week stretch
over the summer when we did the boot camps alone. I hope more people show up because it’s good for everybody.” “We did have workouts where nobody showed up,” Lukic recalls. “One of them, there was a miscommunication about which field the workout was on, and zero people showed up. So we went through those times as well. We basically faced everything.” Fight For Hearts has grown to include four workout programs: the new bootcamp workouts at Burnet Park; a 16-minute chair exercise for elderly tenants at the Syracuse Housing Authority on Almond Street; an hourlong cardio boxing class at the YMCA on Saturday mornings; and a youth boxing class at the Central Village Boys & Girls Club, where Lukic gets kids “excited about exercising to teach them that it’s a part of life,” he says. Having survived so many surgeries, Lukic considers himself blessed to be able to give back to a community
that shaped him into the fighter he is today. In a video he posted on the Fight For Hearts website, with selfproduced music, he documents his third cardioversion procedure: “Skies are clear, and I’m on my way to the ER,” he says into the Go-Pro. “But look at it on the bright side, I don’t have to pay for parking because it is Sunday.” Lukic feels like he’s finally found his purpose outside of his day job. While at Le Moyne, he had ideas of creating a nonprofit fitness organization, “but I finally put my foot down and did it.”
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B E H I N D B L AC K E R T H E B E R RY While most students were jamming at Juice, three student artists threw their own party.
written by Weng Cheong & photos by Crystal Fang
RYAN FRAZIER
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CADENCE
PHIL THE ARTIST
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Ryan Bolton + Ryan Frazier +
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earing a turquoise Hawaiian flower shirt and navy blue khakis in fall, Syracuse University senior Ryan Bolton makes a daring entrance into Panasci Lounge. He illuminates all corners of the room with a beaming smile, eager to talk about his recent success in organizing the alternative Juice Jam — Blacker the Berry. One day after school, Bolton and his roommate Joshua Floyd went to Popeyes. As they discussed their disappointment in the Juice Jam lineup, a thought popped into Bolton’s head: “What if we were to have a Black Juice Jam kind of thing?” They named it Blacker the Berry. What seemed like a crazy, impractical idea soon turned into an achievable reality, as Bolton’s pitch in a group chat of over 400 students quickly became one of the most liked posts. Over the next two weeks, Bolton and Floyd received an outpouring of support from students interested in helping with the event. Additionally, Bolton contacted student artists Cadence and Phil The Artist who both agreed to perform at the concert. “We wanted to make it festival-style,” Bolton explains. “We wanted a good mix of singers, rappers, all types of performers.”
and the free event was held in the University Village Apartment lot on South Campus. The turnout exceeded Bolton’s expectations, and the event provided the community of color with an opportunity to informally protest and suggest better collaborative efforts with University Union, who then reached out to Bolton to discuss how to represent all students’ interests. At the concert, Bolton performed his remix of Bryson Tiller’s song “Exchange,” which received over 3,000 plays on SoundCloud within the first three days of its release. In December, he intends to drop his full debut album Free Reign, a project he’s been working on for three years. Bolton, an Atlanta native, has always been exposed to music, having experimented with multiple instruments including saxophone, bass drum, tympani, African drums, and harmonica. The 21-year-old started singing in elementary school, and he has memories of singing at church events, in school choirs, and in marching bands. As a singer who also played on his school’s basketball team, having the last name Bolton made Ryan the star of jokes sometimes. “My last name set me up for all the [High School Musical] jokes in middle school,” he says. Finding the coincidence funny, Bolton laughed along with everyone while
“What is a world without music?” Blacker the Berry was a nonprofit endeavor. Realizing its potential, Bolton decided to turn the event into a fundraiser for Project GRIND, an SU mentorship organization working with children in local school districts. Everyone who contributed to Blacker the Berry were volunteers,
continuing to compose original songs. Bolton draws his inspiration from a variety of artists across different genres. He grew up listening to old-school R&B classics such as Whitney Houston, Marvin Gaye, and Aretha Franklin, but he also likes to explore new perspectives and upcoming sounds. Some mainstream
artists he looks up to include Frank Ocean, Chris Brown, Drake, and Miguel, a singer he respects because of his technicality and the unique tone of his voice. He also admires Jazmine Sullivan’s gospel runs and stunning vocals and recognizes the importance in production and visual value in Beyoncé’s Lemonade album. Furthermore, Bolton has a natural love for fellow Atlantans like Migos and Future. Bolton, a computer engineering major, hopes to “find ways to mix what [he] loves with what [he] does,” through incorporating his engineering skills into his creative process. Bolton essentially wants to become an audio engineer or producer, thus continuing to inspire and drive culture through music. After all, he asks with that bright smile, “What is a world without music?”
Charles Lopez + Cadence +
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yracuse University senior Charles “Cadence” Lopez boldly walks into Panasci Lounge on a rainy Thursday evening. Wearing a pair of oversized neon-yellow camo pants and a green hoodie decorated with a cartoon cactus, he greets me with a smile. Cadence is one of the three student artists who performed at Blacker the Berry. The 21-year-old Brooklyn native is a member of Free All Minds, a multimedia collective and production organization representing a diverse range of artists. At SU, Cadence majors in public affairs with a minor in sociology while releasing hip-hop music on the side. Instead of enrolling in a VPA program, Cadence chose to expand his artistry through building a better understanding of the world by taking sociology, anthropology, and psychology courses. Growing up with his greatgrandmother, great-uncles, grandparents, and his parents all under the same roof has contributed to Cadence’s “eclectic”
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music taste. His first and secondgeneration relatives introduced him to the rhythmic and musical elements of salsa, merengue, reggae, and all genres of Latin music, and Cadence got inspired by the old-school hiphop his father and stepfather showed him. “My father was born in the 70s,” he explains. “He was the guy in the corner with the boom box and the graffiti.” At a young age, Cadence was told stories of Tupac, Ice Cube, Biggie Smalls, and other rap legends. Coming from a family of writers and published poets has also impacted Cadence. He describes his attraction to poetic wordplay as almost instinctual, his “calling”. The aspiring artist recalls the first nursery rhyme he wrote about Batman in elementary school and the embarrassment that followed when he recited it for his mother and sister in the kitchen. “They were both laughing, and I was so devastated,” he says. “But that was a moment in my life when I realized [rapping] was something that I cared enough about to share with people.” In mid-sentence describing his musical inspirations, Cadence suddenly widens his eyes and raises his eyebrows like a light bulb lit up in his head. “Do you know an artist named Mark Rothko?” he asks. “He paints blocks of color and explores different shades. It helps me understand the abstract forms of art, and I admire the simplicity he puts in his work.” Within minutes of meeting him, it’s clear Cadence is a pure innovator fueled with creativity, constantly inspired by the interpretative and intricate nature of all art forms. In his work, Cadence tackles cultural issues and intends to use his platform to raise awareness. “To be able to understand drug addiction, crime, disenfranchisement, and inequality,” he says, “I try to reflect on that understanding and apply what I can take away from it to my
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music.” Inspired by socially conscious rappers such as Kendrick Lamar and Eminem, Cadence is “obsessed” with the power in intelligently vocalizing his ideas and connecting with others through lyrics. He doesn’t fear addressing the contradictions and hypocrisies in today’s culture. At Blacker the Berry, Cadence performed “Sunset,” an original song produced by Eurythmic. The rapper’s contribution at the event presented him an opportunity to informally protest on behalf of the community of color on campus and also embrace and celebrate the social groups on campus that are often underrepresented. “I think Syracuse University really needs this connection between the different communities on campus,” Cadence says. “Initial conversation is made. Now, it’s just about seeing whether we have provoked action and change in any kind of way.” Cadence is currently working on an EP that will soon be released on his SoundCloud. He hopes to continue evolving as an artist, connecting with his listeners, and generating social change through art form.
Phillip Daniels + Phil The Artist +
A
s he approaches me in the Schine Student Box Office with his cool composure, Phillip Daniels, also known as Phil the Artist, extends his arm and offers me a firm handshake. His hoodie and earphones still on, Daniels elicits a laid back, unfazed vibe. Daniels is a junior television, radio, and film major from Washington Heights, New York. In October, Phil the Artist released his first single, “Did It Myself,” via Apple Music, iTunes, and Spotify. With over 500 likes and 200 reposts on SoundCloud, the young artist is looking to dive right into the music
industry. One of the three performers at Blacker the Berry, Daniels remembers being contacted by Ryan Bolton a few days before the event and feeling eager to showcase his music right outside his University Village apartment. “The weather was very nice out,” he recalls, “There was punch. There was food. Everybody was just having a good time.” Daniels says he always had music in his house. “It is just something I can never let go,” he says. Recognizing his talent at playing piano and devotion to music, Phil’s parents enrolled him in a local music program. Classically trained in piano for over 16 years, Daniels has always been heavily influenced and encouraged by his parents to hold on to his musical gift. His father is a pianist and saxophonist who spent time exploring the sounds of rock classics like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and The Beatles. His mother motivates him to practice his scales on the keyboard. Along with his early exposure to classic rock bands and motown sounds, Daniels admires hip-hop and pop artists such as Travis Scott, Young Thug, and Justin Bieber. Being both a music producer and instrumentalist, Daniels puts an emphasis on making modern sounds and layered vocals. He draws his musical inspiration from whatever he’s feeling at any given time and his lyrics from his reflections on the spontaneity of everyday life. While at SU, Phil the Artist continues writing new songs and is currently producing the music video for “Did It Myself.” He also has other goals in mind. Daniels aspires be a musical score producer for Hollywood films one day. Upon graduation, he intends to combine his classically trained skills, musical creativity, and his academic knowledge to pursue his dreams.
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U N F O R G OT T E N Vacancy gets a makeover in Syracuse with a community mural project.
written by Elliot Williams & photos by Codie Yan
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ot all graffiti is illegal. For the past year, Syracuse school students and community members have participated in an unconventional mural project to beautify vacant properties in neighborhoods throughout the city. They painted the plywood boards on 20 of the 1,300 properties owned by the Syracuse Land Bank, a local nonprofit organization that has facilitated the sale of 480 abandoned properties for productive use since 2012. Logan Reidsma and Liam Kirst, who both worked as community outreach coordinators for the Land Bank through AmeriCorps, were the main organizers behind the project. They primed all the plywood in an abandoned church on the Southside before sending it to local art teachers for the avant-garde paint jobs. The paint was donated from private individuals and local paint shops. Reidsma, a 2016 graduate of Syracuse University, says he and Kirst proposed the mural project as a creative outlet for community members and a way to enhance the deteriorating buildings that would otherwise go unnoticed until getting 1108 HAWLEY ST.
approved for demolition or sale. “We would get a lot of complaints about properties being unsecured or getting broken into,” Reidsma says. “We wanted to allow people to get directly involved and make a change they could see firsthand in their own neighborhoods.” The project was well-received among a majority of community members they spoke to, Reidsma says. Reidsma and Kirst intentionally chose properties near the schools the students attended so they would see their own work instead of vacancy on their commute. Students were given the freedom to conceptualize and paint the impressive art pieces with the guidance of their teachers. The two partnered with 12 art classes and even some local professional artists such as Ty Marshal and Ally Walker. They also organized neighborhood painting events to draw attention to the Land Bank and its mission to fight vacancy. “Some of the challenges these kids face, it’s just unfair,” says Kirst, a Syracuse native and political science student at SU. “And I think there’s something we can all do to change that.”
Painted by Everson Teen Program/ Northside Fest Volunteers
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2310 MIDLAND AVE.
1800 LODI ST. Painted by Dr. Weeks Elementary School
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Painted by 40 Below Public Arts Task Force
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2300 MIDLAND AVE.
Painted by 40 Below Public Arts Task Force
213 CLARENCE AVE.
Painted by Clary Middle School
431 GIFFORD ST.
Painted by Delaware Elementary School
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KIA ORA, N EW Z EALAN D A chance encounter at a Maori village leads to an unforgettable experience.
words & photo by Erica Petz
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t’s late afternoon on June 4, 2017, day two of my solo backpacking trip around New Zealand. I’m standing under the arched wooden gateway to Muruika, a memorial cemetery honoring the Maori soldiers who died fighting for New Zealand in World War II. The cemetery juts out into the clear blue water of Lake Rotorua, on whose shore the nation’s indigenous Maori people established the village of Ohinemutu — and ultimately the surrounding city of Rotorua on the North Island — over 1,000 years ago. A sign under the gate says in both English and Maori that this is a “sacred site.” Out of respect I admire the rows of porcelain white, raised coffins from afar. Ohinemutu is one of only two Maori villages left in New Zealand, and today, I just happened to wander in. Nearby, a man sporting a Cleveland Cavaliers cap talks to a brunette woman nodding along silently. Wondering how this fellow tourist knows so much about Maori culture, I eavesdrop and realize he is actually Maori. He appears to be a tour guide. I inch over to them and ask if I can join. “Kia Ora,” the man greets me, and with a bright, infectious smile, he introduces himself as Shaloh Mitchell.
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Shaloh tells the brunette and me that his family has lived in Ohinemutu for 23 generations. He looks into our wide eyes and repeats, “Yes, 23,” adding that he can trace his Maori heritage back an additional 16 to around the 10th century. “After that we get a bit lost,” he says as continues his tour. We turn around and walk back into the center of the village, a fenced-in square called a marae. To our right is St. Faith’s Anglican Church — a white chapel with red trim — and facing it on the opposite side of the square is the tribal meeting house, Shaloh points out to me as we keep walking. He then leads us past a small log that demarcates the boundary between public and private space. As we walk along the paved path, I notice steam rising from several of the houses in the village. Because this region is home to some of the world’s most intense geothermal activity, the pungent scent of rotten eggs lingers in the air — sulfur. Houses here can’t be built directly on the ground, nor can coffins be buried, since geothermal springs can erupt at random. We walk into someone’s yard and stop next to one such pool, walled off by shoulder-high planks of reddish
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wood. I can hear it bubbling. Maori use the water for cooking and bathing, but tourists shouldn’t climb into any hot spring they see, Shaloh warns. Still stopped, Shaloh gestures towards the communal bathhouses scattered around the village, small shack-like structures painted various colors. He explains that the hot spring water, ironically said to have healing powers, can cause third- degree burns, so they have to mix it with colder water. However, cooking with the unfiltered spring water is safe. Shaloh claims he makes the “tastiest veggies ever” by wrapping them in a cheesecloth and tossing the bundle into the hot spring to cook. Then he directs our attention to a crater in the ground a few feet away from where we stand. Steam flows from this hole covered with a grate. Shaloh identifies this as a pit oven Maori use to cook a
traditional hangi meal — a large bundle of meat and vegetables — a process that takes hours. My stomach grumbles at the thought of getting a taste, but we leave the yard and return to the path. We reenter the marae, and the tour ends at the most distinctive structure in Ohinemutu: the Tama-te-Kapua meeting house. With a statue of the
dotted, tattooed, and scarred. If the men cried while getting these lines etched into their faces — each of the three cuts was made after the previous one had only partially healed — they were undeserving of this mark of pride, Shaloh says. Nevertheless, I’m still fixated on the shells. No matter how dark it is — I realize as the sun sets, painting the sky a creamsicle orange — you can always see those eyes. This building was once only for the chief, Shaloh explains, but now it hosts tribal functions like communal sleeping after funerals. I ask him who the current chief is. His answer: no one. His grandfather was the last village chief, and he never named a successor. Shaloh reveals to us the chief ’s last words, said to the council of elders immediately before his last breath, “None of yous is worthy of being chief.” Now the village waits for a deserving leader to emerge. Shaloh
“People expect to see us walking around in grass skirts with tattoos on our faces living in thatched huts.” tribe’s paramount chief at the top, the meeting house’s red walls are covered in ornate carvings of all the village ancestors. Their iridescent paua shell eyes stare at me from their red faces, with lips snarled and tongues out,
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says they’ll know when they see him. Suddenly a van drives into the square. The brunette waves goodbye as she hops inside to be shuttled to another attraction, but I’m not eager to leave. I want to know more. I ask Shaloh if he would mind chatting with me for awhile, and Shaloh says he has nowhere to be. We sit on a rock outside the only residential house in the marae, sandwiched between the church and the dining hall. This is Shaloh’s family home. He tells me that growing up, many of his non-Maori friends were wary of going to his house knowing there were graves next door, a concern he answered with something his grandfather used to say, “You never have to worry about the dead. It’s the living you have to worry about.” As we sit down, I sheepishly confess that I didn’t expect him to be Maori when I first saw him. Not surprised, Shaloh explains that people often mistake him for being Middle Eastern or Hispanic. Growing up, the 43-year-old faced some prejudice in school both for being Maori and for
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“not looking” Maori, but he always knew who he was. “Generally, we’re proud of everything that we are,” he says. The marae is completely empty now except for Shaloh and me. As I listen to him talk into the Southern Hemisphere winter night, my mind is buzzing with how lucky I feel to have one-on-one time with a real New Zealand Maori. I extensively researched authentic Maori cultural experiences before coming to New Zealand, but all I found were expensive dinners-with-a-show and tours of model villages. I didn’t learn of Ohinemutu until a few hours ago when I glanced at this one flyer out of the countless others in my hostel lobby as I waited to check into my room. Shaloh says the attractions I saw online are all “completely fictional,” and their popularity promotes a Maori culture steeped in stereotypes. “People come here, and they expect to see us walking around in grass skirts with tattoos on our faces living in thatched huts,” Shaloh says with a chuckle. In contrast I point out the Cavaliers hat, and he
admits being a big LeBron James fan. Despite all Shaloh taught me about Maori culture on his tour, he tells me that with Westernization, their way of life is disappearing. Shaloh has fond memories of growing up in Ohinemutu, and he wishes other Maori shared his experience. Today he misses the extent to which the villagers lived a communal lifestyle. He recalls a particularly poignant memory of something that happened often throughout his childhood: A lone fisherman would feed the entire village, starting with the elderly, then the families with lots of kids, and finally everyone else, leaving only a few pieces of fish for himself. “You don’t see that anymore,” Shaloh laments. The absence of a chief hasn’t helped these changes, but Shaloh has faith the village will be okay, he says. “Everything goes through a cycle, and I’m relatively confident that something good will come out of it in the end.”
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C O M E TO T H E TA B L E An ex-NYC event planner gathers the local refugee community to celebrate curiosity, culture, and food.
written by Naomi Duttweiler & photos by Kai Nguyen
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hen Adam Sudmann asks, “Where are you from?” he really wants to know. He also wonders if you’re from Damascus or Aleppo and which local grocers in Syracuse sell the best baharat and sour cherry. This curiosity is what led Sudmann to create My Lucky Tummy, the food event that recruits refugees in the Syracuse area to cook and share recipes from home. Sudmann provides the venue and ingredients, and the chefs take it from there. In total, Sudmann’s brainchild has featured 42 refugee chefs representing 23 nations who have cooked over 75 different dishes, from Somali “sambusa” made with camel and piri piri peppers, to Burmese “mohinga” with tilapia, lemongrass, and shallots. My Lucky Tummy is approaching its 16th event on Jan. 28. Tickets will go on sale for $25 apiece on Jan. 12. The events are held two or three times a year and often host between 200 and 400 people. Past venues include All Saints Church, ArtRage Gallery, and Sky Armory, to name a few. Attendees file in and stop at each of the five chef stations to collect plates of steaming food before choosing their seats. The evening is spent striking up conversations with neighbors and going back for seconds. Jasenko Mondom, a Bosnian refugee and employment consultant for the city’s Refugee Assistance
Program, often refers those interested in cooking to Sudmann. “His idea [for My Lucky Tummy] was, ‘Hey, let’s give Americans some way to meet these people and become friends with them,’” says Mondom, who has attended every event since the first. “There is no better way to become friends with somebody than to share food.” Sudmann has been working with food his whole life. His mother was one of Julia Child’s first students in San Francisco. Sudmann remembers stuffing mushrooms at 4 a.m. for his family’s catering business as a teen. While attending graduate school at SUNY Buffalo — commuting from New York City via cheap flights — he picked up a side job as a caterer to help pay the bills. After finishing his
Ph.D. in English, he became a freelance caterer and event planner in the city. He planned one final event, a promotion for champagne brand Perrier-Jouët, before moving upstate in 2013 to focus on his family. The event had aerial silks dancers, a $1,000-anhour DJ, and a $90,000 budget just for flowers. Although it was a flexible gig that allowed him time off to travel, Sudmann became disillusioned with the over-the-top events. “It was fun, and I got a lot of free alcohol,” Sudmann says. “But you work these impossible hours for something that had no meaning. Hundreds of thousands of dollars for two hours of just a lie, just bullshit.” So Sudmann went searching for something meaningful. He wanted to recreate the African and Asian food
Sarah Robin’s dish at the Oct. 23 dinner: papri chaat, made with yogurt, potato, chaat masala and topped with homemade cumin-ajwain cracker, pomegranate, and mango
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Sarah Robin and Adam Sudmann
markets he explored in his travels. When he organized his “multinational food court” in May 2013, he was afraid no one would show up. To his delight, 160 local food enthusiasts gathered for a sevencourse meal with dishes from Burma, Iraq, Bhutan, Eritrea, Poland, and Cuba. Initially worried about finding the talent necessary for these events in Central New York, Sudmann discovered a diverse refugee community in Syracuse’s Northside. The chefs, paid a flat rate to cook for events, are skilled people with stories and food to share, never charity cases, Sudmann says. Sudmann finds the chefs through refugee assistance programs, friends of friends, and chance encounters. Nancy Aye, a Burmese refugee who came to Syracuse with her parents in 2008, met Sudmann in 2015 while checking out at Aphone, a local Burmese grocery store. Sudmann invited her to the next event, just to check it out, but she ended up getting coaxed into helping the Burmese chefs in the kitchen. She hosted her own station at this past October’s event, cooking
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a Burmese dish of banana leaves and flowers, bamboo, squash, and prawns. Some of the ingredients for these dishes can be difficult to acquire. The “really exquisite” saffron the chefs cook with costs $1,200 a pound, Sudmann says. Ringodel, a South Sudanese dish of smoked goat, peanut butter, and ginger featured in the event on Oct. 23, can’t even be found in restaurants. The last ingredient needed for the October dinner was fresh blood for Vietnamese blood sausage. It’s easy to find frozen, but fresh blood brings out the best flavor, Sudmann says. So he found an Amish farmer 30 minutes from Syracuse who could get him a bucket. Sudmann does whatever it takes to produce the My Lucky Tummy events, even chasing two strangers down the street to ask if they knew how to make “falooda”, a Pakistani version of an ice cream float made with vermicelli, basil seeds, and rose syrup. Sarah Robin was the one to eventually make “falooda” for My Lucky Tummy in 2015. A Punjabi refugee who came to America five years ago,
Robin had never attempted the dish, but Sudmann challenged her to take it on — and it was a huge success. “When I made it, I thought, ‘This is the best food I have ever had in my life,’” Robin says. “And Adam said that too, actually. He said he went to India, he went to different countries, and he never had falooda like this.” When Robin found My Lucky Tummy’s business card at the refugee assistance program Catholic Charities of Onondaga County, she gave Sudmann a call. Cooking at six of the last seven events, Robin has opened her own Pakistani catering business and became a U.S. citizen in November. Sudmann attended the oath-taking ceremony. While requiring a lot of energy, My Lucky Tummy has ultimately been a success for its creator. It has made Sudmann lifelong friends, and he has enjoyed sharing their stories along with their food. But he won’t take all the credit for the success his events have had. After all, he says, “I’m just the caterer.”
fall t wo thousand and sixteen
1 Fez / Morocco
2 Amman / Jordan
3 Madrid / Spain
4 London / United Kingdom
MEDLEY MAGA ZINE
5 Brisbane / Australia
M O M E N TS A B R OA D
6 Bali / Indonesia
international photos from Syracuse Univerity Students
1 Alisa Sokolova 2 Caitlin Harrison 3 Kirsty Fraser 4 Zenny Wang
5 Jared Birchmore 6 Jared Birchmore 7 Weng Cheong 8 Paige Kelly
7 Sรณlheimajรถkull Glacier / Iceland
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8 Plitvice Lakes National Park / Croatia
“TAKE A LIMITATION AND TURN IT INTO AN OPPORTUNITY. TAKE AN OPPORTUNITY AND TURN IT INTO AN ADVENTURE BY DREAMING BIG.”
Jo Franz American author